A known means of managing telephone calls coming into a system controller for a selective call radio system, which has been used successfully, has been to use, equally, all telephone inputs within the controller for connection to any incoming telephone call, irrespective of the type of call. In typical existing systems, such as paging subscriber systems, the vast majority of the telephone calls are by an originator for the purpose of initiating a paging message, which may be a voice or data message, and which is typically queued by the system controller for transmitting to a subscriber's selective call receiver. A small portion of the telephone calls are for other purposes, such as modifying a data base of subscriber preferences, which typically resides in the system controller's disk memory. Typical items contained in the subscriber preference data base are, but not limited to, the hours during which the subscriber wishes pages for his selective call device to be held instead of transmitted. Another example of subscriber preferences is for designating, from a large class of news types offered from a news service, a subset of the news types of interest to the subscriber, which are the only types of news to be transmitted to the subscriber. This saves time and money for the subscriber, compared to receiving all the types of news.
Selective call radio systems, such as paging and two way data systems, are becoming more geographically widespread and the subscriber's, who are more mobile, want service over the wider geographic area. Presently at least two paging systems and one data messaging system are providing service across the United States of America, offering coverage in many metropolitan areas. As such systems continue to grow geographically, the need for making telephone calls to the system for the purpose of making a change to the subscriber preference data base is increasing. For example, the hours for holding paging messages change when the time zone of the subscriber's location changes. Also, the location of the selective call device itself can be an important item included in the preferences data base. The location is important because if it is known, an economical transmission to the selective call device can originate from as few as one transmission site. This is in contrast to transmitting from perhaps all of the geographically separated transmission sites of the system, which could be required when the location of the selective call device is not known.
As selective call systems are becoming more geographically widespread, the cost of making telephone calls to the system becomes greater, because the distance of the telephone call is typically longer. The calls to send a message in today's system typically must contend for the lines also used for altering the subscriber preferences, leading to a lack of messaging service when the system is heavily loaded with preference data base calls.
Thus, what is needed is a means to improve the management of the phone calls coming into the system controller to better assure service to all the telephone call types, as appropriate by the priority of the call type.